George Webster

This article is aimed at those interested in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the sciences—and this includes philosophers of science working out of the analytic tradition. Deleuze's writings are riddled with references to science and mathematics. And yet, the relation between these references and his philosophical thought is not well understood. In this essay, I investigate the nature of this relation—and I do so by asking whether it is naturalistic. Importantly, I draw on insights from contemporary philosophy of science to contribute to a proper understanding of this issue. I show that and how commentators are hamstrung by their lack of engagement with the philosophy of science; I present an interpretation of Deleuze's philosophical project as attempting to articulate an immanent and primitive form of objective modality; I draw together parts of Deleuze's corpus that are relevant to his treatment of the sciences but are nonetheless rarely studied in conjunction (including his and Guattari's distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ science and his under-scrutinized statement of interest in ‘the metaphysics science needs’); and I propose a naturalistic interpretation of his engagements with science.

I provide a metaphysically realist interpretation of Hegel’sPhilosophy of Nature—one that allows us to make sense of one of the more puzzling references to nature in hisScience of Logic. I do so by affording William Maker’s under-appreciated account of Hegel’s realism more of the attention and scrutiny it deserves—not least because it involves a distinctively simple and elegant account of the famously obscure move from logic to nature in Hegel’s system. Though I point out its limitations, I claim that Maker’s arguments can be revised in order to recover more of the rigour and complexity of Hegel’s metaphysics.